The Phantom Visitor

Everyone has a ghost story to tell. Or a story about something that happened to them that can’t be explained away easily. I’m no different. And while I have several I could tell, this one is my first experience with the ‘other’ side of life:

____________________________________

It was over twenty years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I was fourteen and it was summer. Which meant two things: I was too young to get a job, and my parents both worked, so I had the house to myself ALL day.

After rocking out to MTV the entire morning…wait, you DO know they actually played music videos back then, right? Yeah, I’m old, sue me. At any rate, I decided to go take a shower. I had the remote in my hand as I walked towards the restroom. I put the remote on the dining room table when I closed and locked the front door. (Fella has to be safe ya know.)

So, there I was, in the shower. I had just got all soapy when the dogs started going apeshit crazy. Our oldest, Prissy, only barked like that when a stranger came to the front door. So, I jumped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around me and went to see what the hub-bub was. There was no one at the front door.

Prissy, however, was hovering on my ankles. Which was completely unlike her. She was cuddly with one person, my stepdad. On any given day, she could care less if I was in the house. And here she was, post-barking frenzy, acting all lovey dovey on me. I told her to knock if off and walked back to the bathroom to finish my shower.

I got back into the water, and both dogs started barking like mad again. I decided I was clean enough for one day and my hair could wait a day or two for some conditioning. I rinsed off as fast as I could and came back into the living room.

The TV, which had been on MTV, was on the Learning Channel. The remote, which had been on the dining room table, was sitting on top of the cable box. And the top of the remote was covered in the fluffy dust that comes off the ceiling fans.

After a frenzied search of the house, I found that I was, indeed, the only one home. All of the doors were still locked and both dogs wouldn’t get out of my lap until my mom got home from work a couple hours later. When I told her what happened, she said she’d been seeing the houseplants moving at night even when the A/C was off, but didn’t want to say anything and freak me out.

I walked through the house and told whomever was there, that they weren’t nearly as funny as they thought they were, and that I wasn’t afraid of them. I also said they should ‘knock that shit off’. (Needless to say, mom wasn’t there, otherwise, she’d have smacked me.)

Nothing so grandiose as that happened the rest of the summer. It wasn’t until an aunt came to visit the following Thanksgiving that we got some sort of confirmation on our suspicions. My aunt is a self-proclaimed clairvoyant, and real estate agent. She used to give my parents tours of houses she tried to sell that were haunted. But I digress. She wasn’t told ANYTHING about what was going on, an my mom nearly crapped when the woman took two steps into the house and turned to my mom and said:

“Do you have anything strange going on around here? Missing keys, tv’s changing stations or anything like that?”

My mom said, “Why do you ask?”

“Because you have a poltergeist around here. It doesn’t live here, but comes to visit every now and then.”

All the proof I needed!

_________________________________

So, like I said earlier, everyone has a ghost story that has happened to them, or their family in some way. And this is the perfect time of year to share those stories! Leave me a story of something that happened TO YOU or an immediate family member. (I don’t want to hear about some kid you heard about in school one time.) I want this to be as personal as possible.

After Halloween, I will pick out the one that I like the most, and you will win a live reading (either over the phone or Skype) of my short story “Bad Juju”.

I have so many ghost stories, I don’t know which one to tell. I grew up in a very haunted house. The lady who lived in it before us died there of old age. Apparently, she didn’t move on. When we were little kids, we’d be scared to go up the staircase to the 2nd floor because a hand would touch us us the shoulder. My mom would tell us, “Go to bed, I don’t want to hear it!” She obviously didn’t believe. I shared a room with my 2 sisters and we had this china doll that would move around and “dance” at night. Freaked us out. As we got older, my mom redecorated the house. Laid new linoleum in the kitchen, ripped up rugs in all of the rooms, redid the hard wood floors, built a bedroom in our basement. Old ghost lady was NOT happy and that’s when sh*t got real! It was summer and I was 16 years old; I had a friend who didn’t believe in ghosts sleep over. By that time I had moved into the basement bedroom and it was super creepy down there. So in the middle of the night, my friend wakes up and says, “Cindy, the fan went off.” I said, “Wiggle the wire, it does that sometimes,” and she says, “No, it turned off – the knob is turned to off!” She didn’t sleep over again.
Other things happened, too -we’d be sleeping and we’d wake up feeling someone over us, staring at us; sometimes we’d hear our names screamed. Each of us (my 2 sisters and I) had woken up from feeling held down in place, completely unable to move. We’d wake up in the morning with finger print bruises that weren’t there when we’d went to sleep. We’d see and hear the old lady walking around the house. My mother even believed us by this point. There was a constant horrible, angry, negative feeling that lurked in the house. But by far, the craziest thing that happened was one night was my mom was sleeping up in her room on the 2nd floor. My friends and I were hanging out watching a movie in the basement. It was probably 1 or 2 am when my mother came bolting down the stairs, completely out of breath and shaking. (My mom doesn’t run. Ever. She doesn’t even walk quickly.) She had been thrown out of her bed. Picked up and thrown out of it.
It wasn’t just us that felt it either. My poor husband did too. The week after our wedding, my mother had surgery and was in rehab. She asked us, upon our return from our honeymoon, to go to the house and fill the boiler with water. So, being the wonderful new son-in-law, my husband went over one night. I get a frantic call from him saying that he went in and filled the boiler, but the house is so full of negative energy, of the GET OUT kind, that he ran out forgetting his wallet in there. He didn’t want to go back in, but I convinced him by staying on the phone with him. Have you seen Blair Witch, when all you hear is the running and the heavy fear-filled breathing? That’s what it sounded like on the other end of the phone. I was so used to it by now that I just laughed and laughed; he didn’t find it as funny.
I have more stories, but this is long enough. Happy Halloween!

Love it! When I was working pest control, I had a house I did that was haunted by a woman who died of cancer in the house. The house was over a hundred years old, and the current owners had done a TON of research on the family that owned it before them. (They were the first non-family members that owned the house.) They agreed to keep as much of it as original as possible. The walls were lined with dozens of ancient family portraits, all taken around the house. It was so cool.

The one room they changed, was the master bedroom. The woman who lived there told me they had this problem with the closet light always coming on. Every time they turned around, the light would come on. Sometimes even in the middle of the night. Then one day, she got a wild hare up her butt and went to the hardware store and bought a couple gallons of bright yellow paint. Her husband came home from work to find the master bedroom was now bright yellow.

The light in the closet never came back on.

They found out through research that one of the women who lived there, had what they believed to be cancer. She was bed-ridden most of the time, and complained to her husband how dark the room always was. She literally begged him to pain the room yellow to brighten it up. The husband wouldn’t do it, so she would keep the closet light on so she could get more light while lying in bed.

I’ve had a few “wtf” experiences, but the one that I think of most was this:
In August of 2011 I lost my husband to suicide, and by October my kids and I had moved into a new home. One evening I was soaking in the bath and sighed his name out loud. On the counter in the bathroom was a happy meal toy, it was Simon from Alvin and the Chipmunks, the toy had a button you push and it would go, “mua mua muamuamuamua” (kissing sounds). Well this toy, after I sighed his name, began going nuts. I mean nuts. “Mua mua mua muamuamuamua mua muamuamua….” it would restart its cycle before it would even finish. Then when it paused I said “Brandon, is that you?” And again the toy went nuts for about 15 seconds. Non stop, restarting before it’s even completed. I told him I love him and its all ok and it stopped. The toy never went off on its own before or after that moment.
I am one of the most skeptical people there are, but I can’t help but to believe he was really there that day, trying to show me he loves me.

I have many ghost stories, but will share my most recent experience. I had just put my daughters to bed and was sitting in the living room with the lights off, working on a craft project (by light of the television). I heard the pitter pat of little girl feet on the hardwood floor near their bedrooms and knew one of them was awake. I had my head down but could see my daughter out of the corner of my eye, standing at the side of her dad’s recliner. I asked what she needed, without looking up, but she didn’t answer. She never answered me, so I asked again but this time looking up as I said it. As soon as I looked up, the shadow of what I now call “little ghost girl” dissappeared. I went to check on my girls and both were sound asleep.

I have had several other unexplainable things happen since then…the covers being pulled off of me while in bed, cabinet doors opening and slamming shut in the middle of the night, the garage door opening and closing on it’s own, and the ice maker on the fridge going crazy, like someone was attempting to get ice. (Those are just a few of the things.).

So far, she’s just been mischievous. When she starts being mean, it’ll be time to pack up and move!

When my husband Mark and I moved to our house in TN we found out it was haunted. At first it was only sounds; footsteps on the floor above us when he and I were on the floor below(we have a 3 story home); conversations in the hallway or another room when we were elsewhere; a cat meowing at our bedroom door when all our cats were bedded down in the catroom all the way across the house; the shadow out of the corner of your eye as you walk from one area to another and a swooping sound above your head that ended abruptly after it passed by.
It was nothing disturbing at first and it only happened at the beginning of Spring and the end of Fall. but then we started seeing them – a man in his late twenties, dressed in the clothing of the 1930’s; a young girl with blond curls in a pink and gold ball gown; a shadow cat and a grey bird which swoops down from the third floor, circles once then disappears into the side wall. Little jokes started to be played on us; my mom who was visiting felt someone crawl into bed with her one night and when she rolled over, a female voice said, “OOPS” – Mom and I were watching TV one afternoon and saw a man dress in brown go from our living room towards the front door. We thought it was my husband, but he was downstairs in the family room on the computer when we checked. Mark and I were getting ready for bed one night. He was in the bathroom and I was already tucked in, facing the closets with my eyes closed. All of a sudden, I heard a dinner bell ring once right in front of me. I opened my eyes half way and ‘saw’ the girl standing by the side of the bed, a smile on her face. She faded away just as Mark called out “What the Hell was that?” He was still in the bathroom. Even thought these things are not threatening, they are rather startling when they occur. I started researching our home and the area around it and I found out some interesting and puzzling things- our house is the only one to have been built on this piece of property and that was in 1982; there are no records at all of anyone ever dying on this land or in this house; my neighbors also go through hauntings at the same times of the year which includes footsteps, voices and shadow figures. The only thing I can figure out for the whole area being haunted is that we do have two cemeteries, one a quarter mile down the road and the other two miles further down. Both have gravesites dating back to 1792. Maybe these folks just want to make sure their land is still being used properly. Either way, we have all learned to live with our invisible guests and in the seasons when they are not so prevelent, we kind of miss them.

All these stories posted gave me goose bumps. Very neat to read. I have a couple of stories but a few really stick out.
When I was a kid I had a remote control pink car. One night I was woken up by the sound of the car driving around my room and bumping into the wall. Over and over again. I jumped out of bed picked up the car to turn it off and realized there were no batteries in it. I had taken them out the week before because they were dead and I was waiting on my parents to get new ones. The remote was on my dresser turned off. I nearly fainted. I climbed back into bed and put my pillow over my head and sang songs from the Wizard of Oz until I fell asleep. The car never moved again after that. Which is probably a good thing because I am pretty sure I never would have slept in my room again.

Another time my husband and I were visiting with his family in England. He had always told me he believed the house he grew up in was haunted so I wasn’t surprised when one night we were sitting by the fire place in his parents sitting room and one of the glass coals floated out of the fire place and gently set itself down on the hearth by my husbands toes. He shouted a few choice and we both flew back onto the couch. I was not about to pick that coal up. He ran and grabbed a hot mitt and tossed the coal back into the fire place. After that I refused to go back in the sitting room. The rooms on that side of the house were always freezing while the rest of the house was nice and warm. I took up sleeping on the couch and avoided that section of the house for the rest of our trip.

Thanks for posting your experience! I have enjoyed reading all the posts.

Bahaha! The car would have freaked me out the most. We have a few of the boys’ toys that randomly start playing at night here. It usually startles me, but I turn them off and they stop doing stuff like that. So, they are turned on WITH batteries. Can’t imagine what I’d do, if there were no batteries and they still came on. Creepy!

The story from Sharon is super creepy to me. If a ghost actually appeared in front of me and spoke I am pretty sure I would vomit and then pass out. I feel nauseous thinking about it. When a friend of mine was murdered last year we offered to cat sit for her cat while her husband was dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy. The whole time the cat was with us I swear I felt my friend’s presence in my house. On multiple occasions I thought I saw a shadow hovering at the foot of the bed. Not sure why but that actually gave me peace. Unlike my other encounters. Maybe because I felt like I knew who it was. When the cat left amd went back home I stopped feeling her presence. I miss it sometimes.

Similar story I have. When watching my parents house with my girlfriend at the time(my wife now) the dog started to freak out one night. Didn’t want to be in the basement for some reason & bolted upstairs and his in the bathroom. A few moments later a closed door in the basement started moving back & forth like somebody was on the other side trying to break through. There were no windows in the room & no way a wind draft could do what was occurring. My wife & I still to this day are convinced it was a ghost